Last week, Twitter announced a very useful addition to its search functionality. Searching on Twitter will now show up top images and videos; with the option to view plenty more in a visually pleasing gallery, should the search term be popular enough.

We are big fans of photography at 33 Digital and many of us use phone apps to our pictures with the world on Twitter. But images and video shared on Twitter have further importance in our work. We don’t just search what is being said about our clients, we also check what images and videos people post - using services such as PicFog. Thanks to Twitter, our job just became a little easier.

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Yesterday the nation found out its fate: were we or were we not destined to get a ticket to see the Olympics. Throughout the day the media covered the nation’s reactions to the sums of money disappearing from bank accounts as the only clue as to what exactly the lucky few hundred thousand would be seeing in 2012 when the Olympic Games come to town.

Looking at social media, the trends were fascinating to see unfold. We thought it would be a good idea to do a roundup of what we were tracking.

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When you put in exceptionally hard work and show real passion for the work you do, it is nice to be rewarded every once in a while.

For PRs, there is an annual book that highlights these types of people. With only 500 in the list, the PR Week’s Power Book lists the top 1% of the industry’s best. And for the second year in a row, 33 Digital’s Drew Benvie has been added to that list.

Drew is also listed as one of the top 5 influencers in digital PR - a position which this year was voted for by the Power Book’s 500 professionals themselves.

Now Drew isn’t the sort of guy to go on about this, which is why I’ve (like Phil did last year) gone under the radar to show our appreciation of having Drew as our MD. Congratulations fella!

I don’t think so.

The first super injunction to specifically restrict Twitter and Facebook was granted yesterday by the Court of Protection. It specifically adds “social network[s] or media including Twitter or Facebook” to the list of outlets restricted for publishing the identities of those involved (The Next Web).

The logic behind the move is sound: the democratisation of publishing on the web means I don’t need to sell a story to break a story, and the mass market popularity of social networks makes it quick and easy to spread injunction-worthy information like a name.

In reality, anyone who knows how the web works will spot that someone with intent to dodge these rules could easily circumvent these controls. What’s to stop someone popping to a local internet cafe and registering a new account to post the restricted information? Or doing the same at the local computer shop on a demo laptop? Or buying a second hand computer and connecting to a public wifi connection? If I was worried about CCTV, I might splash out on a basic disguise. Twitter is the most public and therefore more likely to be used in this way.

The addition is likely to prevent someone with an established profile (eg a journalist) breaking the news on their public, accountable profile. However, once the facts are tweeted, they are quickly available in the search engine results and can’t be erased from the public consciousness once they’ve begun to spread.

I’m not making a moral judgement over whether someone should do this, instead just a realistic view of how the technology works.

This lack of online command and control is part of the job for us and anyone involved in online communications / community management. What has been proved time and time again is that the internet does not like to be controlled. It sounds like a great idea in practice to include social networks in the injunction but anyone who wants to go out of their way to break the story can and will.

It’s my personal opinion that, despite the good intentions, I think this move is out of touch with the reality of how information spreads online.

Foursquare is the world’s favourite check-in dedicated social network, with over 7.5 million users worldwide and is still increasing in popularity despite the launch of Facebook Places.

With a following made up of so many loyal users, it seems quite apt to have a day dedicated to the act of checking-in. Last year Fourquare made this happen by announcing April 16 as the official Foursquare Day - or 04/16 in American lingo, quite literally 4 squared.

A major part of the check-in culture is due to Foursquare user’s dedication to the site. They check-in to most places they go, find new things to go and places to see based on stranger’s tips and friend’s histories. Some users even let Foursquare make decisions for them. So it is not surprising that Foursquare Day in fact began due to one addict’s love for the network and the geeky realisation that April 16 would be the perfect date to celebrate Foursquare.

The check-in culture has had plenty of benefits for the PR industry. It has led to incredibly innovative campaigns and has increased loyalty for brands that have taken the check-in on board, with generous rewards for the most loyal users, known as ‘Mayors’. The check-in allows businesses know who their customers are, how loyal they are and what they say about the brand. This gives incredible insight into the customer like never before, and allows for brands to manage reputation by direct contact with users.

What will you be doing to celebrate Foursquare Day? 33 Digital’s Luke Murphy is getting hitched, so let us know if you can top that!

I headed over to the first ever London Coffee Festival this weekend. One thing all 33 Digital folks have in common is their love for good coffee, so an entire festival dedicated to the black stuff seemed right up my street.

Overall the event was fantastic. I drank a week’s worth of coffee within the 4-hour period I spent there and soaked it up with masses of free cake and biscotti. But with plenty of independents and some of the mainstream coffee stores handing out lattes, flat whites and cappuccinos left, right and centre - I was hardly complaining.

Something else got my interest, aside from all the free coffee and a surprisingly new fondness for soya milk: the fact that I couldn’t see a significant volume of social media interaction really got me thinking.

Live events are important to the work we do at 33 Digital, because offline engagement helps support and develop community online. So with the work we do for our own clients in mind, here are just a handful of elements I think would have made London Coffee Festival all the more geek for the hundreds of social media types we know share our obsession with coffee.

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PR Week’s in-depth feature last month on the newest hot social network, Quora, asked the question: is it the next Twitter?

Having spent four months on Quora, my experience of it is much different to that of Twitter, even in Twitter’s early days when things there were much quieter. Quora is, in many ways, more like LinkedIn than Twitter. The content is valuable but lighter in volume and looks more like a long tail than a swarm.

Quora’s long tail of content provides an ongoing stream of interaction from an extended social network, from people who you probably do not know but who you have shared interests with.

Once you follow a thread on Quora, you will receive alerts, usually via email, whenever people post a new comment to that thread. The end result is that, even if you only follow a handful of topics that take your fancy, you get a slow but steady stream of interesting discussions coming through to you in a way that looks and feels a lot like the value you get from being a member of a good LinkedIn Group.

You can use Quora in a Twitter-like way, by surfing the live feed on your homepage on Quora.com, but as more and more people begin to graze, Quora is visibly slowing down and its long tail does seem to be adding more value to the community than how it looked at first.

If you have any interests that you’ve chosen to follow through by joining a LinkedIn Group, then try looking up the same interests on Quora and see what this grazing long tail of interestingness looks like, and let us know if you think it works for you or not. We think Quora will be here to stay, and the fact that it’s a slow-burner will be to its advantage.

Foursquare, the location based service that is a part social network, part game, and part recommendation engine, is two years old this week, having been first launched at SXSW in 2009. It’s since grown to a team of just over 50 people, closing in on 7.5 million users, and 2010 saw almost 500,000,000 check-ins.

So when a new version of the service, “Foursquare 3” (or #4sq3 on Twitter), was announced yesterday, the 33 Digital team got excited about what they saw – especially in what some of the new changes and updates to Foursquare mean for the clients we work with.

The key updates for brands will be Foursquare 3.0′s new “Explore” tab, which is a simple idea but will change the way users interact on Foursquare:

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News came out this morning in PR Week about our newest client here at 33 Digital: the global market research Superbrand, Mintel.

You can see the full report over on PR Week online. We will be Mintel’s first social media agency, and working beyond PR and communications into wider organisational departments at Mintel. And keep an eye out for the coming weeks as the 33 Digital team begins its work.

Do you manage a brand Facebook page? Does your Facebook page drive traffic to your site? Have you noticed interaction going down suddenly? Chances are you will soon.

Facebook has ’silently’ made some changes to how your personal News Feed works, meaning that you only see content in your feed from people or pages you interact with regularly. In other words, if you follow pages but don’t often comment or Like their posts, you won’t see them any more (until you change your settings).

For page owners, this could be a considerable shift, as passive followers will as good as disappear.

To check your settings as a user, go to the bottom of your News Feed and you will see a link on the right hand side called “Edit Options”.

If you’re in charge of page, you can’t change these options for your fans. But to make the most out of this situation, alert your fans that they might want to change their settings. And think about ways to engage them so that your content doesn’t end up hidden for good.